🌀 The Continuity Trap

What makes something the same across time?

A ship rebuilt plank by plank.
A body changing day by day.
A person remembering themselves.

This is the first illusion of itness: the confusion between identity and continuity.

We start with a paradox: the Ship of Theseus.^[2]
But what it really carries isn’t just wooden planks.

It carries you.

This chapter traces how structures persist—not by staying the same, but by cohering recursively, step by step, enough to count.

The Heap

Where does a heap begin?

This is the Sorites paradox: how many grains of sand make a pile?^[1]

Identity, even in heaps, seems to arrive before the final grain.

Are we a story we tell ourselves?
A bundle of memories?
A recursive model tuned to survive?

Cognitive models like Metzinger’s ego tunnel^[4] and Dennett’s “center of narrative gravity”^[5] question whether there’s any fixed self at all.

What makes you tomorrow still you today?

Parfit’s thought experiments suggest that what matters is psychological continuity, not strict identity.^[6]

This is a useful metaphor. Bateson saw patterns that persist across time as the true markers of identity.^[11]

Hofstadter went further: what we call a self may just be a strange loop of self-reference.^[12]

These illusions—heapness, selfhood, continuity—aren’t meaningless.

They are efficient. Structurally persistent.
Cognitively viable.

🧠 What holds you together might not be what you think.